The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
Yet, though McLeod and I share a great deal in common in terms of
understanding the significance of the 1960s to secularisation, he nonetheless
has caricatured my treatment of the decade. ‘For him’, McLeod wrote, ‘the
1960s mark a blissful dawn, and the heroines of his story are the millions of
women (mostly young) who rejected the definitions of femininity, the moral
rules, and the career options prescribed by the churches’. 94 My blissful dawn
is displaced by his version in which he places (mostly male) radical priests
and theologians centre stage. His heroes are the political and religious radicals
of 1968 and especially the Christian liberals and ‘pragmatic Christians’
who came in to challenge apartheid, the Biafran War and the Vietnam War
and support other radical causes that disturbed the British establishment.
McLeod follows the line of Gérard Cholvy and Yves-Marie Hilaire, who
place religious change in France as being principally driven by developments
within the religious world. 95 He points to the evidence of liberal Christian
involvement in high political debate on law reforms, emphasising their key
role at certain points (including the votes of seven out of twenty-six Anglican
bishops on homosexual law reform in the House of Lords 96 ). But the struggles
in the streets over gay liberation and feminism involved a mighty contest
with Christian conservatives (including in Northern Ireland where the
Revd Dr Ian Paisley led the ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’ campaign, and in
Scotland where the humanist Labour MP Robin Cook engineered to decriminalise
homosexuality in 1980 in the face of Christian opposition). The fact
is that Christian clergy and activists were the loudest opponents of most liberal
reforms in the 1960s – including opposing measures to end book, theatre
and television censorship, decriminalise suicide, homosexuality and
abortion, liberalise divorce and legalise off-course gambling. There was
never any doubt in the minds of campaigners who overturned these repressions
that their opponents were predominantly Christians in the churches,
even when, as McLeod rightly asserts, the campaigners included Christian
liberals amongst their number. But the existence of Christian proponents of
these reforms cannot detract from the fact that their opponents were
Christians in their own churches. 97
Christian heroes of liberalism there undoubtedly were in the 1960s and
religious historians are starting to explore the modernisation of British
Christianity. Ian Jones and Peter Webster have begun an important exploration
of innovation in church music, and, though the opposition to ‘happy
clappy music’ in many Christian congregations was profound and lasted
long into the 1970s, this undoubtedly laid a musical basis for the evolution
of other trends in Christianity (including Charismatic Renewal). 98 Yet, in
this important work there lies the danger of underestimating just how much
the leisure culture of the young swung from church dances and coffee bars
to an almost wholly secular raft of pleasures. McLeod is not alone in tending
to underplay the impact the sixties had on young people through the
media, and emphasises the intellectuals and what he calls the ‘highly pro-
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